High Tea at The Peninsula Hotel, Hong Kong

So after having our dessert at Causeway Bay, my friend and I headed back to Kowloon and set out to accomplish one of my life’s goals: have high tea at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong.

For those of you who don’t know, the Peninsula is one of the oldest high-class hotels in Hong Kong and it is famous for its high tea. Served every afternoon, it aims to recreate one of the most popular past-times brought over by the British during Hong Kong’s colonial years. Needless to say because the place is so touristy and classy, everything at the Peninsula is notoriously expensive.

Anyways, so we disregarded the price for this once and went and had their high tea set. I must say that it was quite the experience. Everything was so daintily done that we felt rather out of place at times! Firstly, we each got individual tea pots with our choice of teas. I had jasmine tea and my friend had Earl Grey, which was served with milk. They also brought over hot water for us to add to the tea leaves when needed.

Pretty soon the three-tier tea set with the food came. On the bottom tier were three raisin scones served with butter and jam. They were pretty decent scones.

On the second tier were the savoury items: cucumber sandwiches, ham and egg salad sandwiches, a small quiche, a smoked salmon roll, and spinach pastry. I really liked the ham and egg salad sandwich in particular.

On the top tier were the desserts: a cake stick with fruits, cream cake rolls (it had this strange disk on top that I thought tasted like cardboard), truffle (very, very sweet), another chocolate treat (also extremely sweet, esp towards the end of the meal), and a few other tidbits that I can’t really recall.

Halfway through out meal they brought us a raspberry coulis + cheesecake mousse + lychee ice concoction that was absolutely amazing. Definitely the best item of the meal, I thought.

So that’s the end of my one-day Hong Kong adventure! I was absolutely stuffed by the end, but it was great fun, and I had a great time catching up with my friend. Oh, btw, the bill at the Peninsula came up to 500 something HK dollars.